The designer notes say, "First World War Campaigns titles are meant to be played with the Virtual Supply Truck
optional rule activated.". Does this mean that is the optimum choice over explicit supply for "historical accuracy"?
As a background, since i have asked this question for the PzC series, I understand that virtual supply tends to more randomly distribute low supply problems, whereas explicit supply gives the player a chance to influence where supply problem occur and allows them to designate more effectively areas of maximum effort. Moscow '42 clearly states that it was designed for use of virtual supply (if I recall correctly) because of the unique supply problems of that campaign.
I like explicit supply and how it can encourage a bit more historical play as I will rest sections of the front line, which really isn't needed with VST. However, my experience also tells me that it is very hard to get the number of supply units right - many games I have played with explicit ends up with either too much supply, giant stockpiles growing, or too few. The worst was a fun third party add-on Bulge campaign that, as German, I spent most of the game with my mobile troops low fuel - essentially every single unit - and most artillery unavailable. Each day's supply was not enough to keep even 10% of the German army with ammo and fuel, probably less, and I never had more than maybe 5-10 artillery units available in an average turn, out of probably 300 on the map, or even more.
Rick
Yes, Rick is exactly right. VST is basically the safest choice. Explicit supply can create the most realistic results *IF* the amount of explicit supply units are "just about right". Unfortunately there is no real science to determining what "just right" is. :(
I did my best to calculate it, basically providing one 100 vehicle supply units per non-reserve corps per day (which is typically ~4 trains per army), and then the supply source % that it arrives at determines its arrival chance for that day. Of course the idea was to not provide excess, so that some armies have to sacrifice their supply to help out other armies that need it more. I put a lot of thought into it, but unfortunately you just have to try it out and see if you like it.
One good thing is true: both sides suffer or benifit equally from explicit supply in FWWC, because I used the same methods for both sides. In other words, it should be "balanced" either way.
I always believed that ES would make the desert scenarios play out in a more historical way, but I hit the same problem with too much or too little supply, as Ed said it is almost impossible to get things "just right" for any particular scenario.
Aside from not wanting to fog my brain and tire my mouse hand moving trucks and wagons around, adding more units to already large scenarios, my major gripe with Explicit Supply is that you can't prevent it from being squandered on shot-to-pieces or heavily fatigued units who wind up near the supply column while other units in the neighborhood that are in decent shape have to sit around begging for bullets. This kind of relates to the whole getting-it-right thing in that one never feels like he has enough supply in the first place, and then he frequently can't give what he does have to the guys who could put it to good use.
VST isn't perfect, either, but it works well enough for me.
Right, the one way you can pick and choose when to distribute supplies with ES units is to keep the supply units in T mode when you do not want them giving them out. However if the supply range the ES unit is too large, then once you bring them out of T mode then everything in range will gobble up the unit. :( The best way to avoid that is to pull back some units that you specifically want to supply and then push them back up when they are resupplied, but that isn't always possible, of course. On the other hand, unintended units drawing off supplies is probably not completely unrealistic either.
The trick is making the supply range large enough that you don't have to go to each unit, but not too large that you end up supplying units, and I found that (IMO) the ideal range is something like 2 hexes. But yes, that is another issue with ES units in general (more units added, and limited amount of control of supply distribution).
What I don't like about ES is you cannot start loading up a supply base to start moving it forward or rearward to create another supply point. That would require a study to find out and crate transport units and add them to the game. But if that was done, maybe it could also be created to have a button or menu option like available airstrikes to have supply units, that when clicked on, it highlights all the units that can be resupplied within supply units movement range, obviously have longer range along roads than cross country, leaving you the option of resupplying any unit you want to.